Privileging prejudice: the threat and opportunity posed by the movement for 'religious freedom'

The new "religious freedom" movement arose in the US as a backlash to marriage equality.

Some commentators have compared this new movement to America's former Jim Crow laws, not because anti-gay discrimination is as serious as racism, but because the legal cornerstone of both the racial segregation movement and the new religious freedom movement is the legalised refusal of commercial and government services to members of a stigmatised minority.

The other key parallel is a persecution narrative which makes out the dominant group, be it white people or people of faith, to be innocent victims of an aggressive minority determined to turn the tables on them with the full backing of the state.

This persecution narrative has deep roots in Christianity.

The idea that persecution results from, and testifies to, religious rectitude goes back to the time of the Gospels.

Scholars like Candida Moss have shown how anti-Christian persecution was greatly exaggerated by ancient Christian writers to bind Christian communities together.

But the myth is so deeply embedded in our culture that we all know what contemporary religious freedom advocates mean when they talk anxiously about "Christians being thrown to the lawyers".

Like the ancient persecution narrative, the contemporary version requires heroes and martyrs.

Hence the celebrity status of people like Kim Davis, a Kentucky county clerk who was taken to court after she invoked religion to justify her refusal to do her job of registering same-sex marriages, and Jack Phillips, a Colorado baker who was subject to an anti-discrimination complaint that was appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court when he refused to serve a same-sex couple.

The "religious freedom" movement establishes itself in Australia

In Australia, the religious freedom movement has been very successful in establishing the same narrative.

During the marriage equality postal survey the No campaign was almost entirely about threats to religious freedom, freedom of speech and parental rights.